How Later Anti-Jewish Readings Distort the New Testament

Interview Transcript

Shirley

I am so glad to welcome back Professor Meredith Warren to The Bible and Beyond podcast. Today, we’re taking on a tough but vital topic: how anti-Jewish ideas have crept into common interpretations of the New Testament. Christians and Jews have long wrestled with their shared story and understanding that the relationship remains essential to both traditions. Meredith and her colleagues, Eric Vanden Eykel and Sarah Rollens, have tackled it head on with their new co-edited book, Judeophobia and the New Testament: Texts and Contexts. Meredith is a senior lecturer in biblical and religious studies at the University of Sheffield. She’s also Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies, and author of several other insightful works. You’ll find those links in our show notes. I’m so glad to have a chance to talk with you about this directly today, Meredith. What a great topic. Thanks for being here.

Meredith

Thanks so much for having me.

Shirley

Well, anyway, one of the reasons I really wanted to pursue this conversation with you is that on your opening page, you make a very arresting point that some of these passages in the New Testament had meanings that were completely different from what they were made to mean in their later anti-Jewish context. And I have to say that that alerted me to wonder how much I’ve been reading the New Testament with these later lenses skewing my interpretations of it. Maybe we should start there. Could you talk a little about how you came to that conclusion?

Meredith 

Yeah, I mean, I think everyone comes to the text with their own individual way of reading it and we can’t help that, right? We are all individuals. We have our own pasts> We have our own intertext floating around our head and each of us is always going to come to the text slightly differently. And that means we can’t really ever be confident that we’re going to read it in exactly the same way that the author might have had in mind for us. So, we read it in conversation with other biblical texts that we might be familiar with or that we might hold important. We read it in light of things that faith leaders might have said about those texts. We read them in light of our own personal experiences apart from those texts.

And so when we are recognizing the troubling passages in the Bible, there’s lots of different ways to approach those different passages. One of the ways is trying to recognize that these texts were written in a different context from our own and recognizing that their authors may have had different ideas in mind and might have had different social conditions to the ones that we’re reading them in now. Of course they did, it’s 2,000 years ago.

And then the other thing that we can keep in mind is that interpretation is a choice.  And we have a choice about how to interpret and how to read these texts. And we can choose to read them in ways that are less harmful than others, right? We’re obligated, I think, to try and alleviate harm in these very powerful and authoritative texts. So, we can’t erase the violence that these texts in Scripture have.  And we can’t ignore the interpretations that various theologians have done that have done real harm. There are phrases and sentences and passages in the New Testament such as John 8:44 that can’t be explained away and those need to be honestly confronted.

Shirley

And what does that passage say? What does that passage say?

Meredith

And I think that passage talks about… it says that “Jews are of their father the devil.”

Shirley

Oh, yeah, that’s pretty harsh.

Meredith

So, it was one of the ones that was sort of put on hateful banners over highway overpasses  every couple of months in the last 10 years or so. It comes up quite often. It was in the social media profile of one of the synagogue shooters—one of the synagogue shooters we have to say “one of” because, unfortunately, there’s been more than one. So that’s one of these sort of key texts that’s obviously quite a violent, a violent passage. And so we have to wrestle with those and there’s different ways of doing that.

Shirley

Well, I was surprised to even think that the way I’ve sort of always thought about it might be off. I have to think about it in a new way. So that was…you got my attention, I have to say. So actually, I even think that the organization of your book is quite compelling. In the first part, you talk about what you mean by “Judeophobia” and some of the context for the way that’s come about. But then in the second part, your guest authors show examples of the way it worked in every single book of the New Testament. Wow.

So why don’t we start with part one? You say that there’s a problem even with the term “Pharisee”—that we understand Pharisee not only as an ancient Jewish sect, but as it represents self-righteousness and hypocrisy. Isn’t that how Jesus saw them?

Meredith

Yeah, so “The Pharisees” is a chapter that I wrote with Sara Parks and Shayna Sheinfeld. And we’ve written before together. We wrote Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean together. And that chapter is really important, I think. It’s sort of emblematic of what’s happening in the New Testament as a whole. And on the one hand, yes, the Pharisees were a historical group within Judaism in early Judaism. We can know something about what they believed, what their activities were, what their social standing was and things like that—we have evidence.

On the other hand, we have the sort of the Pharisees of Christian imagination who almost stand in for the “big bad” of the gospels in many cases. And that’s not entirely consistent because we have examples of Pharisees trying to save Jesus’ life in Luke 13:31. We have examples of Pharisees deciding to follow Jesus, which the gospels think is the “good thing,” right? An example of a good Pharisee is one who follows Jesus. Obviously, that’s problematic in its own way. But we have different descriptions of the Pharisees in different places.

But the overall way that the gospels choose to represent the Pharisees is as the foil for Jesus. And so, then in later popular understanding of the Pharisees, it’s almost like a synonym for ‘hypocrite’ or ‘self-righteousness.’ And so, you get this sort of stereotype of: if you’re doing religion wrong, if you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. If you’re sort of false in your religion, then you’re a Pharisee. And that’s often sort of a, you know, a nickname or a way of disparaging often Christians who are doing religion the ‘wrong way,’ whatever that means. So that’s how it gets up where people call each other ‘hypocrites,’ and they just say ‘Pharisees’ everywhere.

Shirley

So how would you suggest then that modern readers distinguish between historical Pharisees and these rhetorical tropes?

Meredith

Yeah, I mean, it’s really tricky because obviously all the texts we have from antiquity have a lot of rhetoric in them. They’re designed to convince people of a certain thing. So you do have to read really critically and try and gauge from as many sources as possible and triangulate which things seem more likely and which things seem to have a rhetorical force behind them.

If we look at all of the values that we know the Pharisees held from sources like Josephus and even from reading really critically in the Gospels and in other places in the New Testament, we can actually see that Jesus and the Pharisees actually agree on most things.

So Jesus and his followers attend the synagogue and the Pharisees do as well. Both groups are really concerned about washing before a meal, although they disagree about how to do that. They both agree with the greatest commandment. They both want to live a frugal lifestyle or value that. They both enjoy widespread financial and theological support from women. They both believe in the afterlife and the resurrection. In tithing for charity—all sorts of things that they all agree on. So, there’s actually not that much…they’re not as different as we would imagine.

So first, that sort of should help make a first shift. It’s like, okay, we can notice that actually if we line all these values up, they hold most of the same values. So there must be something else going on because they’re not that different to have this kind of explosive argument all the time. So, if we look at Jesus and the Pharisees then, not as sort of mortal enemies, but as representatives of both Jews having a debate on something that’s important to them, which is Jewish law, right? How to observe the Sabbath, what’s the best way? What is and isn’t permitted? Is divorce something that is important to talk about?

For both of them, yes, it is important to talk about. How and whether to wash. This debate— this process of debating Torah—is a very Jewish thing to do. And we have examples in the Mishna and the Talmud, which are full of the same kind of debate among rabbis much later, right? So, if we think about those as conversations rather than, you know, “the Pharisees are the enemy of Jesus,” instead “they’re conversation partners—both trying to figure out and debate about what the best way of interpreting the law is.”

Shirley

So is that how you would explain then—you use the example of Jesus debating with the Sadducees and Pharisees—and he usually curses them for not practicing what they preach. So, are you saying that this is really just sort of a debate rather than a pronouncement of hypocrisy? How would you read this cursing?

Meredith

I mean, there’s certainly a lot of rhetorically charged, vitriolic language in the Gospels. And so, I think we have to separate out on the one hand the historical Pharisees—which we can try and piece together that kind of relationship—from the characterization of the Pharisees in the Gospels. And their characterization is on purpose to try and set them up as the “baddies” in this relationship. So, I think the passage you’re talking about is the one in Matthew 23 with the “woes to the Pharisees”. And it’s this sort of list of woes that targets the Pharisees and scribes and this sort of list of things that’s meant to look pious. But according to Matthew’s Jesus—because Matthew’s Jesus is also a character—we don’t have the historical Jesus in Matthew either. We have the character of Jesus as Matthew is presenting him.

But I mean, that passage is actually quite complicated, too, because Jesus says to follow the instructions of the Pharisees. He says to do whatever they teach. So there’s something going on there about Jesus actually respecting and valuing the way the Pharisees are interpreting Torah. But he’s wary of people who don’t appear in his—this Jesus’s—view not to follow their own advice. And this concern about sort of a mismatch between teachings and actions is also a very Jewish concern. We see this in like the Babylonian Talmud, for example, where there’s concern for words not matching deeds.

But I think we need to understand what’s happening in this passage in Matthew in light of an earlier passage in Matthew 5, where Jesus is critical of the Pharisees being too soft, not strict enough—because the Pharisees permit divorce! But Jesus calls it adultery. And the Pharisees forbid murder, and Jesus is like, “Well actually, let’s also forbid anger!” So this is a practice of sort of a trajectory of Jesus being more cautious, more conservative about avoiding any violation of the law, whereas the Pharisees seem to be okay with slightly less conservative interpretations of it. So when Jesus, in Matthew 23, is calling them out for not practicing what they preach, what he really seems to mean is that he’s upset that they don’t put as wide a margin around Torah observance as he would like.

Shirley

I see. That’s helpful. Well, all right then, let’s keep going here with this.

Since we’re using the example of the Gospel of Matthew, we ought to turn to the second part of your book, which does take one book at a time. It seems like the book sounds pretty anti-Jewish. And in addition to the verse that you just talked about, there’s that really nasty “blood curse,” where the Jewish leadership accepts the responsibility for Jesus’ death! Is that right?

Meredith

Yeah, yeah, that’s a really horrible section and it’s used, it’s been used horrifically and violently throughout the centuries. Our Matthew chapter is by Nathan Shedd, and I think he did a really great job in addressing the sticky, some of the stickiest bits of Matthew in the book.

Shirley

Yeah. In your book, right? You’re talking about?

Meredith

Yes, the Matthew chapter in our book in Judeophobia is by Nathan Shedd. We had different authors for every single chapter.

So there is debate about the relationship between the author and Judaism. Whether the author is Jewish, or whether he’s a Gentile author writing against Jewish factions in the Jesus movement, or whether he … you know if he’s a Jewish author, maybe he’s having disagreements with other Jewish Jesus followers in his own community. There are debates about that.

Shirley

And you know, let me stop you for a second. Maybe you should explain what the “blood curse” is before you get too far into it.

Meredith

Okay, sure. Yeah, so it’s this claim, it’s at the crucifixion … well, it’s just before the crucifixion, and Pontius Pilate is giving the Jewish crowd a choice between Jesus or this criminal Barabbas. And all the Gospels depict this scene, but Matthew’s Gospel is the only one that fully absolves Pilate of any responsibility. It’s the only gospel where Pilate washes his hands and declares himself innocent. And it’s the only gospel that has this specific blood curse, which is: the Jewish crowd all cry together, “his blood be on us and on our children.” It’s really horrible. And Mel Gibson made a point of including it in his passion movie. So, he didn’t have to.

Shirley

Okay, that’s it. Go ahead then and explain.

Meredith

Sorry. My point was we don’t really know what the author’s own relationship was with Judaism—whether he was a Jewish author writing to people of his own community, or whether he’s a Gentile author who’s sort of arguing against Judaism as a whole—we really don’t know. But one of the things that I think is really important to remember is that we need to separate out intent from effect. Whatever the intention of the author is, we don’t know. But the effect of this passage and the effect of other passages in the New Testament has been devastating. So, we need to focus more on the effect of these passages than trying to sort of make apologies for the text based on the original intent. So whatever the effect is, we need to try and fix that rather than leaving it there uncritically examined.

So, the other thing I wanted to say about this passage—the phrase ,again, is “his blood be on us and on our children”—the reason why that phrase is so devastating is, in part,  because of how Matthew’s gospel as a whole deals with the idea of lineage and descent and ancestry. There’s like a genealogical relationship going on. And so, we see this in the genealogy that Matthew starts with, leading up to the nativity scene. And we also see it in how Matthew situates the Jewish leaders as the sort of the last in a long line of Jewish leaders killing Jewish prophets, including John the Baptist and then Jesus.

Matthew declares that these Pharisees and the scribes are the descendants of those who killed the prophets of scripture. And so there’s a dangerous narrative of that genealogy playing out in Matthew’s gospel that’s really damaging. And that gets exploited later on by church fathers like Justin Martyr and Origen and even today, that sort of says, “Well, if the Pharisees are the descendants of the previous prophet killers, then today’s Jews are the descendants of those, that crowd, that Jewish crowd.” So Matthew’s genealogy sort of creates that line, that direct line between that blood curse and sort of dangerous anti-semitic movements later on.

Shirley

All right, Meredith, I hope you have a good answer to this: Where do we go from here? It feels kind of devastating.

Meredith

Yeah, I mean, it can be really difficult and I think it’s okay for those things to be difficult. But I’m gonna come back to the idea that intent and effect are two separate things and use that to sort of encourage everyone, but especially scholars, to reflect on how our interpretations might have negative effects and to be more self-aware. That regardless of our intention, we don’t want to replicate anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish stereotypes or myth. But we need to be really aware and sort of self-critical about accidentally replicating them in our scholarship or, if you’re not a scholar, in your sermons or in your groups or in your way of speaking generally in the world. Having the tools to recognize how damaging these texts have been and how damaging their interpretations have been—and then taking extra care to not replicate them, and to sort of push back against them.

Shirley

And you know, I can’t help but think that Jesus was a Jew. We have to just sort of think of him that way. And so, is it possible to even think of this as kind of like an internal dispute between Jewish Christ followers? Does that contribute to our deepening of an anti-Jewish perspective? Maybe tell us how you see Matthew’s attitude toward Jewishness.

Meredith

Yeah, I mean, again, these things are really complex. And we have this idea of the parting of the ways, which is this sort of imaginary moment in history when Judaism and Christianity finally became independent religions rather than Christianity being a way of being Jewish, basically. You know, some people imagine that there was sort of a hard line, and all of a sudden, they’re separate—and it was early, and it started with Paul, or it started with Jesus himself, or something like that. Most scholars think it’s probably a little bit later and a little bit messier than that.

And so, you know, Adele Reinhartz has a really good article on, it’s called “A Fork in the Road or a Multi-lane Highway?: New Perspectives on the ‘Parting of the Ways’ between Judaism and Christianity.” And it’s a way of thinking about the different times and different places that Judaism and Christianity diverged from one another and then sometimes came back on one another. It’s a messy tangled relationship. All that to say, we have to think about whether or not we understand Matthew as establishing a sort of difference between whatever his own way of following Jesus was and Judaism, or if Matthew still imagines himself as within Judaism. And people are going to disagree with that. So it’s definitely possible that those vitriolic statements represent an internal debate among Jewish groups, or even between two Jewish Jesus-following groups, or it may be a disappointment about synagogue authority in the aftermath of the destruction of the Jewish temple in 70 by the Romans, right where leadership and authority were in sort of flux or chaos. And it’s entirely possible for an insider group to be very critical of emerging power dynamics or popularity and to express that disappointment in mean-spirited ways, right. So those are all possible things.

But regardless of that original context that we can imagine, the text has been interpreted in the way that it’s been promoted in those interpretations anti-Jewish violence. And it’s responsible for one of the most horrific anti-Semitic stereotypes in history, which is that the Jews killed Jesus. So, on the one hand, sure, it could be originally that Matthew is having an internal Jewish debate with his conversation partners and it just gets a bit nasty. But on the other hand, we still have to wrestle with the aftermath.

Shirley

Yeah. So like you even make the point that the author of this Matthew’s gospel tends to brand Jews in their own cultural context. What do mean by that? What’s the problem with that?

Meredith

Yeah, so this is, again, this is Nathan Shedd’s chapter. And he kind of discusses the way that later Christian authors try to use Matthew in order to paint Jews in a bad light. So they’re using that text for their own purposes. And this is obviously long after Matthew was written. So, for example, Origen is trying to extend the vitriol in Matthew to Jews in Origen’s own time. And same with Justin Martyr, who, like, comes up in every single chapter. It was really interesting to edit this, because the same names crop up over and over again.

You know, Nathan talks about how this isn’t something that’s just done in antiquity either, but it still takes place today. And so, he uses an example of a present-day white supremacist group that uses that genealogical language that we talked about in Matthew to racialize the declaration in Matthew 27—that blood curse—to say that present day Jews are actually the descendants of Satan or are demonic. So, that’s how that text is used in that specific example from today.

And I mean, I don’t think the author of Matthew could ever have predicted that use of the gospel. This is not the intent of this gospel author to just sort of provide that support for that argument. But equally, it’s our responsibility as readers of this text, as readers of the Bible, to try and prevent the text’s use in this way. And I think this is just a joint responsibility for anyone who has any kind of relationship with the New Testament.

Shirley

I think that’s where you got my attention—was to make me think about how am I reading it? Because I never really thought about it. I just thought, well, I read it and I interpreted without thinking how I interpreted it. But yeah, I’m paying attention to it now. I’m wondering if you could maybe give us maybe just one more example from another New Testament book that would look different but still illustrate your point about this distorted, inherited biases.

Meredith

I mean, I learned a lot editing this book. I don’t have expertise in every single text of the New Testament. Obviously no one does. So I learned a lot from all of the chapters that approach Paul’s letters. So, in sort of general terms, we’ve got two thematic chapters, one on the law and Torah by Shayna Sheinfeld, and Matthew Anderson gave us an overview of, like, Pauline scholarship as a whole. And then, of course, we have fantastic chapters on each of the Pauline and Deutero-Pauline epistles. And I think these letters can often feel very difficult to decipher at the best of times. And these days they tend to get read in sort of a supersessionist way that implies that Paul understood Christianity as replacing Judaism with this oppositional idea of, like, faith versus works or grace versus law.

And so, I think our chapters do a really good job of complicating that. And one of the things that I think people usually miss or people often miss is that Paul is not writing to Jews in any of his letters. He’s only writing to Gentiles. And he’s trying to convince specifically Gentiles that following Jesus is not a two-step process where they have to become Jews first and then follow Christ. So, his discussion—when Paul’s saying you don’t have to follow the law and you shouldn’t be following the law to get to God—that’s specifically aimed at Gentile communities and not at Jews or Jewish followers of Christ. So, Paul is writing in this context where some Jewish Christians were trying to argue for that two-step process, that Gentiles should convert to Judaism first and then anything else.

But Paul is actually thinking in terms of eschatology. He’s thinking about the end of days, right? About God’s kingdom coming on earth. And at the end of days, there’s supposed to be this in-gathering of the nations as it’s called, so the in-gathering of the Gentiles where the Gentiles all come and worship God. But for that to happen for Paul, the nations actually have to stay nations. If they’ve already become Jews, then the prophecy cannot come true. So that breaks the scenario; he’s worried about that. So, I think that’s a really important thing to understand. Like if you don’t understand Paul in the context of first century Jewish apocalyptic thought, you run the risk of misunderstanding his, again, very hyperbolic and rhetorically charged claims about things like law, and about things like faith and grace and salvation.

Shirley

So I can see how that would make it sound anti-Jewish when that’s not what he’s talking about. That’s a very interesting point. I’m glad you brought that up. Well, do you have any suggestions on how we might improve our reading of the New Testament now? How do I go about reading this by myself now? What do I do?

Meredith

I always tell my students when I teach them New Testament texts, they read The Jewish Annotated New Testament, which I find really helpful and useful for contextualizing things. It just sort of helps understand these texts within their Jewish context because they were written largely by Jews. Obviously, our book helps and it’s aimed at anyone who wants to understand and read these texts more critically, more carefully. And I really think if we can have an eye to kindness when we read and to thinking about what is the kindest way that we can read these texts, these texts are powerful today. Whether you’re a Christian or not, these texts are everywhere in our society, and we have a choice to read them in a way that prevents harm if we would like to do that. So, I learned a lot from the authors when I was editing this. So, I hope that also helps people read things in a different way and to read the New Testament more critically and kindly.

Shirley

I think that’s a wonderful kind of conclusion for this—to think that our whole goal is to read kindly. What a novel thought. Read the Bible kindly.

Meredith

It’s from Elizabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza. So, she said it way back when.

Shirley

Yeah, that’s beautiful. All right, so would you show us your book one more time and just give us the title so we have a feel for what we’re talking about here?

Meredith

I sure will. This is Judeophobia and the New Testament: Texts and Contexts.

Shirley

And your co-authors are?

Meredith

Eric Vanden Eykel and Sarah Rollens and lots of lovely contributors as well, 35 contributors.

Shirley

Thirty-five contributors. Wow, that’s quite a project you did. I really, really am grateful that you put this effort together. I think it’s such an important topic for us right now in the world of trying to figure out how we live together with different kinds of people. And the whole idea of kindness is just a miracle. Thank you so much for being with us today.

Meredith

Well, thanks for having me on to talk about it. Yeah, thank you.